Beware the Eternal Triangle

07 February 2014, 06:59

Okay. I know it is Friday, and we normally keep things light and jovial on this day of the week. But the following story, which I read in the *Pretoria News, is just too painful to bear on my own. I’d like to share it with you in the spirit of: “A problem shared is a problem halved.” In the spirit of half-an-ubuntu, if you will.

Long before most of you youngsters out there were born, way back in 1958, an American group, The Kingston Trio, recorded a song called: **Tom Dooley. I was only ten years old at the time, but the words of this song scared the sheet out of my little khaki shorts. (Maybe that’s one of the reasons why I hit the bottle so hard, many years later.)

But that’s not important right now.

The song starts off with a banjo picking softly in the background and a guy, speaking in a sad, solemn voice, saying: “Throughout history there have been many songs written about the eternal triangle. This one tells the story of a Mr. Grayson, a beautiful woman, and a condemned man named Tom Dooley. When the sun rises tomorrow, Tom Dooley must hang…”

I was just an innocent young boy back then, who got most of his information from attending Sunday school, and listening to Bible stories. The way I interpreted the song’s words, was that Tom Dooley had done something similar to that which Adam had done, when he unlawfully, and with malice aforethought, manhandled Eve’s eternal triangle in the Garden.

I thought that Tom Dooley had been fiddling under the beautiful woman’s fig leaf, and that Mr. Grayson had witnessed this dastardly deed.

But Adam got off lightly, on the one hand. He was only banned from the Garden of Eden. Poor Tom Dooley, on the other hand, was sentenced to hang! (Damn raw deal, if you ask me!)

Be that as it may, I was scared witless of ever touching, seeing, or even talking about a female’s eternal triangle until I was well into my twenties. And even then, I only did so under cover of darkness; with no witnesses present to tell the tale.

Now, let’s get back to the Pretoria News, shall we?

The headline:

Mercy for wife after ‘crime of passion’ against cheating hubby

Two Pretoria High Court judges had sympathy with a woman (Gladys Chauke) who, in a “crime of passion,” pulled her two-timing husband (Mashimbye) so badly by the testicles that he had to have stitches.

“It emerged that the incident took place after the fed-up Chauke called her husband to meet her at the home of his girlfriend. She then locked the three of them in a room and confronted her husband about the affair. She had then pulled him (around) by the testicles…”

The girlfriend said she had to forcibly remove Chauke’s hand from her husband’s testicles. Mashimbye jumped out of a window to get away. Mashimbye told the court that the injury was so severe that a doctor had to patch up his genitals.

The magistrate said in his explanation to Judges Tolmay and Pretorius: “Instead of resolving this impasse of her husband’s infidelity, she (Chauke) battered him in a vicious, cruel, and degrading manner. His testicles were grappled and pulled with such brute, crude, and raw force, that he bled profusely.”

The court was told that Chauke had attacked “a very delicate, intricate part of human anatomy.”

Alright! Enough of the violent stuff. (You guys can uncross your legs and your tightly locked thighs. You girls can stop smiling and thinking evil thoughts. The worst is over.)

My heart goes out to Mashimbye and his delicate body part. Can you imagine having your dooleys used as the rope in a tug-of-war contest between your wife and your girlfriend? And, to add insult to injury, having a doctor put stitches in the battle-scarred member.

I don’t know. Maybe Tom Dooley got off better than Mashimbye, after all. At least Tom was spared the humiliation of having his privates aired in court…

Thank you, dear reader, for sharing half of the pain of this story with me. “A problem shared is a problem halved.” Remember?

THE END

We play this story out with a song:

*Banjo picking softly* Guy, speaking in a sad, solemn voice:

“Throughout history there have been many songs written about the eternal triangle. This one tells the story about a Gladys Chauke, her two-timing husband Mashimbye, and his beautiful girlfriend’s triangle. When the sun rises tomorrow, Mashimbye’s dooleys will still be hanging… painfully.”

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